Adweek included a pretty cool infographic in an article published earlier this week entitled The Trouble With Back-Ends. Under the heading “What Your CMS Says About You” they profiled some of the leading CMS platforms along with some generalizations about the types of users for each. Of course, as with any stereotype, there’s often truth in those generalizations.
I’m pleased, of course, that Crowd Fusion was shown as an innovative, early adopter platform. But more important than that was the accompanying article. The author points out two conflicting trends: first, that publishing platforms are becoming more essential – both to traditional publishers and to brands; and second, that legacy systems, whether built in-house or licensed from traditional vendors, are not equipped to manage the multitude of platforms and devices required for reaching your markets.
We’ve seen those same challenges in our customers’ environments. For years, content management systems were focused on publishing to a single platform – the web – and its unrealistic to expect that they can simply bolt-on solutions for mobile and tablet devices, integrate payment systems and play nicely with all the social media platforms.
Another clear theme from the article is that there’s no “one size fits all” solution on the market. In the blog arena, Word Press comes close to that, but most publishers want more flexibility and power than you can get from a blogging platform. Instead, they want to leverage their vast databases to create topic pages, track user preferences to customize the user experience and build really cool widgets and apps to meet the needs of their advertisers.
A key reason why I joined Crowd Fusion is that our solution addresses the challenges faced by today’s publishers and brands. By providing a platform, not just an application, we give publishers the flexibility to create a vast array of products. Some clients rely on our team for services, while others build out ongoing products themselves. Our business model, in which enterprise plugins are shared across our customer base, helps future-proof our clients, as we will always be building the hooks into whatever platforms come next.
While I think it’s great that Adweek recognized Crowd Fusion as a “bright, shiny object” I’m looking forward to next year’s article when they can talk about how we’ve helped more publishers break out of the “failed CMS” rut. In the meantime, if you're looking for a platform to drive innovative new apps, give me a call.
